Google’s Mapping Tools Spawn New Breed of Art Projects

The Google Street View car is like the ultimate street photographer, a robo Cartier-Bresson methodically scouring the streets and documenting what it sees. But most people use GSV for practical purposes, and they view any drama or comedy captured by the roving 360-degree camera as accidents.

A few photographers are now looking for these 'accidents' intentionally. Instead of walking out on the street to find interesting scenes and people, they are simply curating the pre-documented streets from the comfort of their desk at home.

Michael Wolf, for example, uses a camera to photograph scenes from Google Street View open on his computer's browser. In February, his honorable mention in the Contemporary Issues category at the World Press Photo Awards for A Series of Unfortunate Events ignited a storm of debate. Some balked at the idea that Wolf's project was photojournalism, while others embraced the decision and called for more conceptual leaps and redefinitions of photojournalism in the digital age.

Wolf is not the first to employ an office-chair appreciation of the Google world. Before and since other photographers and artists have developed projects riffing on GSV and Google Earth. Read on for a collection of the most interesting projects with statements from their makers.

Above:

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Wolf's first project with GSV was a compilation of fleeting moments of no particular location: People flipping the bird, actual birds in mid-flight blocking our view, dismembered shadows, a crouched woman urinating behind a car and so on.

A former photojournalist, Wolf found many of the scenes in his early series on GSV forums such as Google Sightseeing and GoogleStreetFunny. With later series, all his finds were his own.

"It's a real file that I have, I'm not taking a screenshot," he told The British Journal of Photography. "I move the camera forward and backward in order to make an exact crop, and that's what makes it my picture. It doesn't belong to Google, because I'm interpreting Google; I'm appropriating Google."

Without specifying location or knowing the date of the original capture, A Series of Unfortunate Events amplifies Google's own dismantling of time and space. Google will update GSV, periodically fusing images from different years within the same town or city. If they have not been replaced already, the scenes from Wolf's browser will soon disappear from Google's world.

"I think its extremely interesting what artists are doing with Google Street View, Google Earth, GPS and Twitter," says Wolf. "It's one of the important functions of art, to interpret contemporary issues."

Top photo: Image #7 from A Series of Unfortunate Events by Michael Wolf.

Bottom photo: Image #50 from A Series of Unfortunate Events by Michael Wolf.

Nine Eyes

The title for Jon Rafman's Nine Eyes project is a reference to the nine camera lenses in the original roof-mounted spherical rig atop Google vans (the rig now has 15 lenses). The project was one of the first to collate GSV scenes, and certainly the most expansive. Rafman's attentions fall upon ambiguous scenes of danger or serendipity or - as with Wolf - accidents.

"A large part of the interest of GSV is the possibility and reality of exploration," says Rafman. "I see exploration as a fundamental human characteristic and I often organize my GSV exhibitions around the excitement of exploring a particular theme."

Rafman, like Wolf, has made use of GSV forums as well as spending hundreds of hours cruising the virtual streets himself. But where Wolf focuses on humans, Rafman's selections seem particularly concerned with the condition of nature. His images of buffalo, penguins and performing sea mammals are from a vantage point so close, one wonders if they're GSV shots at all.

When Rafman does portray people, his scenes of human interactions are antagonistic. Where Wolf incorporates scenes of strangers helping one another in the aftermath of an accident, Rafman shows us police lining suspects up against a wall.

"Google's cameras witness but do not act in history," says Rafman. "For all Google cares, the world could be absent of moral dimension."

Photo: 'Untitled,' from Jon Rafman's series Nine Eyes.

A New American Picture

At least partly an homage to Walker Evans' American Photographs, Doug Rickard's project is interested in GSV's dialogue with the legacy of American street photography, the roadtrip and the documentary tradition.

With the Google car as proxy, Rickard takes us to the economically depressed towns of Detroit, Memphis, Oakland and Camden, NJ.
It is a hypocrisy of the documentary tradition that audiences demand to see the poverty at home and abroad without physically taking themselves there. The insult, of which Rickard is presumably aware, is at play doubly in A New American Picture; as a photographer, Rickard never set foot on those streets and the Google cameras recorded the people and environment with mechanic indifference.

Writer and photo blogger Joerg Colberg considers A New American Picture the "benchmark" for GSV projects. "Needless to say," adds Colberg, "Doug has been not very good at PR, so people now think that Google Street projects are basically just superficial fluff."

Photo: #83.016417, Detroit, MI. 2009. By Doug Rickard.

No Man's Land

When England-based Mishka Henner hit a "conceptual dead end" with his documentary work he started thinking outside the box.

"I knew of Doug Rickard's A New American Picture and felt there was fertile ground to do something interesting with GSV," says Henner. "I came across online communities using Street View to trade information on where to find sex workers. I thought that was the subject to work with."

Self-published in book form, No Man's Land is a series of GSV screengrabs of roadside prostitutes in rural Italy.
It's Henner's most recent project using Google platforms. Previous works include Dutch Landscapes which used Google Earth, Photography Is which used search engines and 51 US Militarty Outposts which used Bing and Google Maps.

"I operate like a hunter (or a vulture hunting for scraps) from the comfort of my own computer," says Henner. "A bit like the US army drone operators, we seem to do most things remotely these days. We shop, communicate and even kill remotely. So why not photograph remotely? It makes perfect sense."

While Henner confesses that at first it felt a bit "lame" to spend so much time in front of the computer as a photographer, he realized that most of a photographer's time was spent there anyway, working and processing files.

"The assumption that artists are spending weeks and months roaming GSV looking for material is just not true," says Henner. "It isn't GSV that's being mined but all the community generated sites out there that point to all these sightings found on GSV. In this work, the artist is for the most part following the crowd or making work that tries to sculpt [the crowd's product] into a coherent and revealing form. The photo traditionalists haven't caught on to that yet, they seem to think other people's sightings are not valid material for making documentary work."

Henner also noticed an odd dynamic introduced by Google's technology into No Man's Land that he felt was a poignant commentary.
"The fact the women's faces are blurred by the software, that they look at the [GSV] car with the same curiosity that we have when looking at them, and that the liminal spaces they occupy are in the countryside or on the edge of our cities - it all has such great symbolism for our time."

Versificator

Nick Mason's Versificator takes its name from the machine in George Orwell's 1984 that creates literature and music independently of human input. The project consists of gorgeous, eery landscapes from the UK, Scandinavia, Alaska and Canada where Mason says the light is cleaner and produces better quality images.

"These images were never intended to be more than mere information, compiled by a machine and possibly never even viewed by a person," says Mason. "By my choosing of them they begin to become something else. I'm interested in the re-structuring of information and the 'rehabilitation' of data."

For Mason, real and virtual worlds can be probed in similar ways with an artist developing a style in GSV the same way one would with a traditional camera.
"I am attracted to particular content on Google in the same manner I edit information in the real world with a camera," he says.

Photo: 'Norway' from the series Versificator. By Nick Mason.

Street With a View

Not limited to photography, GSV has also spurred performance art. Coordinated by Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett, Street With a View was a Pittsburgh neighborhood's response to the arrival of GSV camera vans.

"At the time of Street With A View's conception, Google was just starting to map Pittsburgh," says Kinsley. "Our city was one of the first US cities to be mapped and GSV was in news a lot for issues pertaining to invasion of privacy, surveillance, big brother, etc. As artists, Robin and I saw an opportunity to play within this system and, instead of dwelling on the darker issues, to explore it as a site for artistic production."

In 2008, Kinsley and Hewlett teamed up with the GSV crew to stage a series of performances in their neighborhood that were then incorporated into the map itself. The scenes ranged from a parade to a garage-band practice to a seventeenth-century sword fight.

"For the first year or so of the project, ours was one of the few streets in the world of GSV where faces were NOT blurred, which was fantastic! Now, however, blurring has taken over even our street. I don't know when or why this change occurred as we were never part of this process."

Photo: From Street With A View performance project. By Ben Kinsley.

Hoaxes and Mysteries

While not exactly art, Google Street View has also uncovered its fair share of pranksters and puzzles which deserve a mention in this list.

Mischievous hoaxers in Berlin staged a fake birth (above) on the sidewalk for the benefit of the GSV van. For a short period of time speculation was frenzied, but Google soon confirmed it was a fake.

Virtually There

For his Google project, Andreas Rutkauskus composed images of the Rockies in Google Earth and then hiked the actual Rockies with his large format camera to capture those same images in real life.

Distinguishing between real and virtual landscapes isn't as simple as you might think. The best clue? The unlikely cloudless skies of Google Earth are the give away.

"I examined historic photographs of the mountains, topographic maps, and images and GPS tracks on websites," writes Rutkauskus about Virtually There. "After considering this data, I composed views of the Rockies in Google Earth."

"The title of the Google views are the latitude and longitude for my apartment in Montréal, where I created the images. The title of the real-world photographs are the GPS coordinates of the location where the shutter was released."

Photo: Andreas Rutkauskus. N 45° 28' 34" W 73° 37' 18"

Map

Germany-based artist Aram Bartholl has built a physical manifestation of Google's map marker and installed it at the Google-determined center of several cities. At 18 feet tall, the map marker appears at the scale that corresponds to the most zoomed-in level of the Google map UI.

Built in physical space, Map, according to Bartholl, "questions the relation of the digital information space to every day life public city space."

Bartholl and his team have installed Map in Berlin, Germany; Szczecin, Poland and Taipei, Taiwan.

"On one hand the markers cast a shadow on the digital map as if they were physical objects," writes Bartholl on his website. "On the other hand it is a simple 20 pixel graphic icon which stays always at the same size on the computer screen. When the map is switched to satellite mode it seems that they become part of the city."